PRISM could foil the public-cloud campaign, and private clouds might lie in crosshairs

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

Just as a good share of consumers are concerned about their privacy after news broke about the National Security Agency’s PRISM program, some cloud-computing executives believe the news could hamper their industry as well.

In fact, government access to data in clouds could be blown wide open if the FBI gets its way in passing certain legislation. But that could be in the future. For now, actually, the workloads running on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds could be harder to get at than data inside higher-level consumer-cloud services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications…

SaaS customers concerned

Elad Yoran, CEO of cloud-security startup Vaultive, said he has fielded “dozens and dozens and dozens” of inquiries since the PRISM news hit about how companies using SaaS programs can protect their data. “I don’t think there’s a company out there that will consider Google or Office 365 without asking themselves the question about unauthorized — from their perspective — disclosure to the government and whether they’re willing to take the risk that their data is sitting unencrypted in a database, out of their control,” Yoran said…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/prism-could-foil-the-public-cloud-campaign-and-private-clouds-might-lie-in-crosshairs/